great clip. i really want to love this. despite the contemporary kill bill backlash, which i wholeheartedly understood and condoned, i went back and rewatched them recently and it’s still some powerful cinematic shit. i still think the guy is brilliant when he’s digging in the right places. i wouldn’t say he’s fallen from grace because i don't think what he’s doing now is any less exciting than pulp or dogs ever were. his heart has never been in the right place, with the exception of one film. but when he's generating quality, i'm a fan.

yeah, the kill bill backlash is absurd. i saw them both last week too. vol. 1 is a masterpiece, one great sequence after another, a virtuoso performance in direction from tarantino. vol. 2 just falls appart at the end with the talking, but overall they're truly GREAT entertainment.

yeah, the kill bill backlash is absurd. i saw them both last week too. vol. 1 is a masterpiece, one great sequence after another, a virtuoso performance in direction from tarantino. vol. 2 just falls appart at the end with the talking, but overall they're truly GREAT entertainment.

How is the backlash absurd? Vol. 1 is a masterpiece? Are you saying it's Tarantino's best work?

I understand the Kill Bill backlash. Even though Tarantino established his credentials for genre reworking early on, Kill Bill takes the genre reworking tone to a new, cartoonish level. The Kill Bill movies have none of the gritty and semi realistic tone that were in his first three films. It smelled like content exploitation to me, to the point it felt like caricature of Tarantino himself.

I re-watched the Kill Bill movies just last year on a whim. Suckered in by friends, but they still remain ridiculous and half interesting to me. The older they get the more I see the films in a line of other over the top, anything goes, action-type flicks. They can be fun is unassuming and imaginative, but Tarantino wants Kill Bill to house its own temple. They're too self consciously cool and important about themselves. I also rewatched Pulp Fiction a few months back and it only got better to me.

Pulp and Dogs (and I guess Jackie Brown) still work because they're not just about playing with genre. They have such novel concepts as themes, and actual characters with actual flaws and actual motivations. Kill Bill and Death Proof worked on the level at which they were intended, which is genre exercise, but they're empty movies. They're very pretty eggs with no yolks. And honestly, Death Proof is just a complete mess to me. Kill Bill at least managed to elevate the genres it was aping, but Death Proof somehow managed to be less entertaining than most of the grindhouse flicks it was derived from.

I have no real preconceptions about Basterds as of yet. The clips I've seen have been (mostly) promising, but I'm not all that impressed with a lot of what Tarantino has had to say about the movie.

his best work would be pulp fiction. maybe. but I don't categorize films that way. i never saw the kill bill movies as ambitioning more than what they accomplished. maybe other people did, and saw them as who knows what back then, and now comes the backlash because they weren't...what? prfound enough? groundbreaking? you guys tell me cause they always were bubble gum entertainment to me. and you can make a masterpiece in that also. vol. 2 fails to me precisely because at the end is just like this overexplanation of things, and it's just not fun anymore.

his best work would be pulp fiction. maybe. but I don't categorize films that way. i never saw the kill bill movies as ambitioning more than what they accomplished. maybe other people did, and saw them as who knows what back then, and now comes the backlash because they weren't...what? prfound enough? groundbreaking? you guys tell me cause they always were bubble gum entertainment to me. and you can make a masterpiece in that also. vol. 2 fails to me precisely because at the end is just like this overexplanation of things, and it's just not fun anymore.

Everything to Tarantino is cinema. Everything is equal and everything is worthwhile. That has been his philosophy for the last eight years and it has allowed him to talk about Kill Bill with no remorse about it's less than grand interests. Kill Bill is still exalted art to Tarantino. A lot of his followed have flocked to this ideology.

You like it as entertainment and I'm glad you do, but others aren't that simple about their appreciation. Because the film cross references different genres, they have found it's multi layered and ripe for critical inspection. That has led to some annoying statements about its artistry and I think they should be backed up. I don't mind statements about it being good entertainment because everyone's sense of entertainment, like comedy, is wholly different and hard to really debate. Like Austen Powers would say, it's not my bag, baby.

I'm more against those who are bellying it up to unnecessary things. You said masterpiece and I took exception, but you explained yourself well.

it's true, everything is exalted art, but his movies don't stop there. he's still got compelling characters and an un-predictable script. I still think Tarantino's playing into the media's label (and his own) as a movie geek does his films a disservice because he's certainly got more vision and originality than the sum of his favorite films. inglorious basterds though, just LOOKS bad, and I'm talking about it strictly in terms of cinematography 'cause I haven't seen very much else. I also thought it was going to be more war but it seems more like a revenge film at the outskirts of the war?

it's true, everything is exalted art, but his movies don't stop there. he's still got compelling characters and an un-predictable script. I still think Tarantino's playing into the media's label (and his own) as a movie geek does his films a disservice because he's certainly got more vision and originality than the sum of his favorite films. inglorious basterds though, just LOOKS bad, and I'm talking about it strictly in terms of cinematography 'cause I haven't seen very much else. I also thought it was going to be more war but it seems more like a revenge film at the outskirts of the war?

true. that's one of the great aspects of his films, particularly pulp fiction and kill bill. you just don't see anything coming in those. pulp fiction is kind of paced in a laid back, relaxed manner. kb vol. 1 is just action, but they both share that capacity to surprise and twist and turn in unexpected ways.

in sum, the guy is better than he gets credit for these days, and everyone seems frustrated with him for not doing...something else. I don't know what would that be...in any case, Inglorious Basterds looks bad. But Death Proof looked terrible and I was pleasently surprised (no masterpiece for shure, but a lot of fun really, and I love the ending). Back when I saw the trailer for Jackie Brown it didn't looked too good either. Again and again this guy's been proving he knows what he's doing, so it might just be thet IB will be awesome.

these type of lines are the biggest downfall of Tarantino movies. it's the talky end of Kill Bill 2 type of dialogue, all the chick dialogue in Death Proof, it's the dialogue that comes out of his mouth in interviews type of dialogue. really, it's most of the dialogue he's written post-Jackie Brown. it's just not cool like he thinks it's cool. it's cringe-worthy uncool in fact.

I wish he'd had that painted. It's too bad they rarely (if ever) do that anymore.

Logged

We often went to the cinema, the screen would light up and we would tremble, but also, increasingly often, Madeleine and I were disappointed. The images had dated, they jittered, and Marilyn Monroe had gotten terribly old. We were sad, this wasn't the film we had dreamed of, this wasn't the total film that we all carried around inside us, this film that we would have wanted to make, or, more secretly, no doubt, that we would have wanted to live.